English + Un beau matin
Short reviews for busy people
English by Sanaz Toossi opened two nights ago at Soulpepper and it’s a slighter piece than I expected. The four learners and their TOEFL teacher we get to know only a wee bit. A grad student needing a good test score in order to be accepted at a university abroad is competitive, rule-defying and impatient; the young girl in her dungarees is jittery and funny; the teacher on a mission to get them to speak English only in class is a returnee to Iran after 7 years in Manchester and a big evangelist for the global lingua franca; the sole man of the group turns out to be American by birth but for some reason (his life feels more authentic, it’s suggested) he much prefers living back in Iran, the land of his ancestors. Why is he in this class? It’s not entirely clear. Why has the teacher left Manchester? “I got tired,” was all she would say. The one character that does indeed come with depth is the lovely middle-aged woman who is in class because she believes her son in Canada wants her to emigrate and have her move in with his family to help raise their grandchildren. She often phones him to give him reports of her progress, but he’s stopped picking up the phone and more often than not her conversations are with voicemail. He is kinder to me in Farsi than in English, she tells the class, and when her turn comes to present a piece of music to the others, she chooses a Farsi song, against the speak-English-only rule. She is the first to drop out.
The English-learning classroom in a country in a continuing political turmoil that is losing its educated population to the angloworld in droves is a setup with great potential. Here this potential isn’t entirely used up, and parts of the play that get bogged down in pronunciation and corrections (those indefinite articles, man…) bring to mind Ionesco’s absurdist play The Lesson. Iranian society is reticently kept away from the play, though some visual details speak more than words: all women wear hijabs, but all of them loosely, with the bangs fully visible. There’s a notion, throughout the play, that the old country is authenticity and the fullness of home and English of an adopted country means a career and a good passport, and this dualism is something that children of immigrants – more than the immigrants themselves – tend to take at face value. Sanaz Toossi is an American who grew up in California; it’s her mother who’s an immigrant from Iran. Had it been written by an actual immigrant, this play would have been different, with fewer certainties about where home exactly is. Toossi writes it in retrospect, from the position of a westerner imagining the immigrant condition.
The most dramatic moment actually took place at curtain call, when all four actresses came out without hijabs. This was the emotional peak of the evening: too bad it was outside the play itself.
One Fine Morning, directed by Mia Hansen-Løve (closing Feb 23)
A recommend for Hansen-Løve’s latest. Léa Seydoux plays a sandwich-generation single mom who starts an affair with a married friend while her family is in a crisis as its once-patriarch is about to be moved out of his book-lined home and into a medical institution. Both mother and father are partnered with other people and her sister has her own family, and this menagerie, and its divisions of labour and conflicts and memories, ring true to life. There are little bijoux all throughout the film, like the stand-alone scene when the Seydoux character and her daughter visit the great-grandmother to see how she’s coping, and the late octogenarian gets several minutes of excellent monologue, or when Seydoux’s mother brags about her direct-action environmental activism undertaken alongside some kids in their twenties. (“She voted for Macron and now she’s protesting against him”, says her partner during a car conversation, to which she responds “Well, people are complex, quoi”.) Canadians will be gently reminded by this film that most of the world raises families in apartment buildings – I know Torontonians who will wince at some of the scenes in tight kitchens. The melancholy piano tinkling is strategically added to long walks and transit rides. Un délice.